Students With Special Needs, Teacher Preparation for Diversity

Early Efforts to Prepare All Teachers for Students with Special Needs

When educating children and youth with special needs alongside their able-bodied peers was mandated by the federal government in 1975—in what we generally refer to today as “inclusive education”—the question of how to prepare teachers for their responsibilities for educating this population of students was addressed simultaneously. These early efforts to reform the curriculum of teacher education were supported through a federally funded program called the Dean's Grants, whose goal was to integrate information about children and youth with special needs into the education curriculum for preservice student teachers preparing to take positions in regular PreK–12 classrooms. Prior to this time, most teacher education programs did not require any information about students with special needs in the curriculum for those planning to take positions as regular education teachers. But the combination of the new realities of classrooms following the implementation of the IDEA legislation at the PreK–12 level, alongside with support from the Dean's Grants, resulted in states beginning to require that all teachers be prepared for their work with students with special needs. Usually this requirement was met by mandating the completion of a three-credit course on special education in order to become a licensed teacher. Typically this arrangement required minimal interaction between teacher educators from special and regular education. Rather, the required courses were the responsibility of special education faculty—in addition to their work preparing teachers who would be licensed to teach only students with special needs. Often such courses focused on the characteristics of various categories of disability (e.g., cognitive impairment, learning disabilities, hearing impairment) rather than on how to organize and implement instruction to meet students' needs.

As a result, although issues related to teaching children and youth with special needs were beginning to be included as a routine part of the larger picture of what it meant to prepare teachers to work with the full range of diverse students they would teach, they were addressed in isolation from the rest of the preservice curriculum and typically divorced from sociocultural issues related to diversity, such as race, class, culture, or language. What developed was a relatively segregated system in teacher education, one that viewed special education as something qualitatively different from the emerging curriculum focus on multicultural education, social justice education, and diversity education for teachers. Rather than situating students with special needs within their cultures, communities, socioeconomic classes, and first languages, in practice the teacher education curriculum for disability was, from the start, largely decontextualized and was added to the curriculum rather than being integrated into it.

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